Marriage

Biologically speaking, procreation creates the family relationships of an individual: who your parents are
determines your grandparents, your aunts and uncles, your cousins, and so forth. Assuming the woman
and man are married, marriage and its resulting family relationships seem basic. How many ways can
people marry and have families? Quite a few, it turns out. We begin with marriage.

Defining Marriage

What is marriage? Persons with little knowledge of cultural diversity might say that marriage is a
relationship between a woman and a man involving romantic love, sexual activity, cohabitation, child
rearing, and shared joys and burdens of life. People trained in law might also note that marriage has legal
aspects, such as joint property rights and obligations to share support of children. Religious people may
want to include their beliefs that marriage is a relationship sanctioned by God, a relationship that should
last until the parties are separated by death. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual people will want to add their own
provisions. These provisions are broadly applicable in many modern nations. However, they obscure the
diversity in marriages that anthropologists have uncovered. For example, choosing one’s spouse is not
always a private matter decided by the couple. In many cultures, marriage is likely to be a public matter
that involves a broad range of relatives who must consent to or even arrange the marriage.

Further, as often as not, romantic love is not considered necessary for marriage, and sometimes it is not
even relevant to the relationship. Couples do not marry because they “fall in love.” For example, in
traditional China, Korea, and Japan, a man and a woman seldom had a chance to fall in love before they
married because they usually hardly knew each other and often had not even met. Sometimes boys and
girls were betrothed at birth or as children. Even when couples married as adults, the marriage was
arranged by their parents with the aid of a matchmaker, usually a female relative of the groom’s family or
a woman hired by them. She tried to find a woman of suitable age, wealth, status, and disposition to
become a wife for the young man. The matchmaker would “match” not only the couple to each other, but
also the woman to the husband’s parents. This was important because the new wife would be
incorporated into her husband’s family; her labor would be under the control of her husband’s parents,
especially her mother-in-law; she would revere and make offerings to the ancestors of her husband’s
family, not those of her own parents; her behavior would be closely watched lest she disgrace her in-laws;
and her children would become members of her husband’s kin group, not her own. Even cohabitation in
the same house does not universally accompany marriage. In many villages in Melanesia, Southeast Asia,
and Africa, the men sleep and spend much of their time in a communal house (called,

appropriately, the men’s house), while their wives and young children live and sleep in a separate dwelling.
Other Western cultural notions of and customs about marriage do not apply elsewhere. Sex is not always
confined to the marriage bed (or mat). There may or may not be a formal ceremony (wedding) recognizing
or validating a new marriage. The marital tie may be fragile or temporary, with individuals expecting to
have several spouses during their lives. Or the tie may be so strong that even death does not end it. For
example, in parts of old India, there were strict rules against the remarriage of a higher-caste widow, and
such a widow often followed her husband to the grave by throwing herself onto his cremation fire (a
practice now illegal in India). Finally, there are culturally legitimate marital relationships that are not
between a man and a woman. Among the Nuer of the southern Sudan, sometimes an older, well-off
woman pays the bride wealth needed to marry a girl. The girl then takes male lovers and bears children,
who are incorporated into the kin group of the older woman. The pastoral and horticultural Nandi of Kenya
allow marriage between women. Some men have more than one wife, and at her husband’s death
surviving wives normally receive a share of his cattle, which they, in turn, pass along to their own sons.
When a married woman grows too old to bear children and happens to have no sons to inherit the cattle
given her by her husband, she may take a younger woman as her wife, thus becoming a “female husband.”
She picks a sexual partner for her young wife, whose male children then become the heirs of the “female
husband.” The two women, however, are not supposed to be sexually active after the birth, with other
men as well as with each other. Regina Smith Oboler, who worked among the Nandi, reported that the
relationship was almost identical to that between a married woman and a man. (We have more to say on
same-sex relationships in Chapter 11.) Because of such diversity, defining marriage to encompass all the
cross-cultural variations in the relationship is hard because there will always be some people who do not
fit the definition. As you can imagine, numerous definitions have been offered, but there is still no
agreement on the “best” one. Most anthropologists agree, however, that marriage in most human
societies involves the following:
• A culturally defined (variable) relationship between a man and a woman from different families, which
regulates sexual intercourse and legitimizes children
• A set of rights the couple and their families obtain over each other, including rights over children born
to the woman

• An assignment of responsibility for nurturing and enculturating children to the spouses and/or to one or
both sets of their relatives

• A creation of variably important bonds and relationships between the families of the couple that have
social, economic, political, and sometimes ritual dimensions

If we define marriage in this way, do all societies have some form of marriage? This question is tricky, and
not just because the definition above is problematic. However, the answer appears to be no. Consider the
Musuo (also called Na and Naxi) an ethnic group of Yunnan Province in the south of China. The Musuo are
ethnically distinct from the Han, China’s majority population. Among Musuo, a typical adult woman
remains at the home of her mother and siblings. Men visit her at night for sexual intercourse, but such
visits carry no commitment or obligation. Both people have multiple sexual partners. The man does not
spend the night and seems to have no obligation to his children, or even to recognize them as his. Children
are raised by their mother and her own family, which means that Musuo has no nuclear families. Either
the woman or her male visitor may initiate the communication that leads to their sexual relationship, but
it is always the man who visits at night. The Musuo lacks all four aspects of the definition of marriage given
above. Therefore, they have no marriage as we define the term, nor do they have marriage as most people
understand it. Cai Hua, the Han Chinese ethnographer, says that the Musuo show that marriage and
nuclear families are not universal human institutions. (Where, we might ask, is the “backbone” of Musuo
society?) The Han, who are the majority ethnic group in China,find Musuo so different that many of them
visit Yunnan province to see them. Han people often view Musuo women as promiscuous and the Musuo
people as matriarchal. (If this were true, in these two respects, Musuo would contrast strongly with
traditional Han practices, which perhaps is why so many Han are interested. The Chinese central
government has a policy of helping the development of the country’s more remote, poorer regions,
including the rural areas of Yunnan province. So, the government encourages Han visits and has even
helped establish “parks” where Musuo perform their allegedly traditional songs and dances.

However, the Musuo are very unusual. Nearly all other peoples have some institution that is recognizably
“Marriage.”